This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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Portrait of the Artist As a Nice Jewish Boy
The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952 By Allen Ginsberg Edited by Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan Da Capo Press, 416 pages, $27.50. Somewhere along the line, Allen Ginsberg changed American poetry — even American culture. Conventional wisdom says it happened the night of October 7, 1955, when Ginsberg performed his…
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In Seventh Heaven
Forward reader Nochum Elek inquires: “I would like to know whether the Yiddish expression in zibnten himl [in seventh heaven] is a translation from the English, or whether it is the other way around and the English ‘seventh heaven’ comes from the one mentioned in the tractate of Hagigah in the Talmud, where it says:…
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Film & TV Daniel Pearl’s Father Laments ‘Moral Equivalence’ of ‘A Mighty Heart’
The father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is criticizing “A Mighty Heart,” the new movie about his son’s abduction, suggesting that it falls into the trap of “moral equivalence.” In an article for The New Republic Online, Judea Pearl writes: You can see traces of this logic in the film’s comparison of…
The Latest
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The Power of Unpretty Poetry
Bob Perelman’s poetry — 16 books in the past three decades — can be explained by what it does not do. Perelman, who came of age in the late 1960s, has always reacted strongly to what he saw as the reigning aesthetic of the time: a cult of individual voice where the poet was something…
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Master Blend
Canadian-born musician Josh Dolgin, aka DJ Socalled, is reviving the centuries-old Jewish tradition of klezmer music the only way he knows how: by mixing it with obscure samples, superior beats, bilingual rap and the occasional reference to his “ding-a-ling.” Dolgin has inspired his fair share of skeptics — people who disapprove of pairing traditional klezmer…
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Place and Time: When History Becomes an Asset
Politics makes for strange bedfellows, but so, too, does architecture. I refer here to those buildings that survive the passage of time and the ups and downs of their respective neighborhoods only to be turned into something else: factories into condos, warehouses into restaurants. In this instance, what pleases the eye and tickles the imagination…
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Plucking the Strings of Tragedy
The Savior By Eugene Drucker Simon & Schuster, 224 pages, $23. To write a novel about the Holocaust is to enter, willingly, into precarious territory. What at first seems like a rich mine for inspiration is a subject seemingly ever present in contemporary literature of a certain sort, yet ever impossible to label cliché. Authentic…
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Neither and Both
l An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry Volume 1: 1801-1953 Volume 2: 1953-2001 Edited by Maxim D. Shrayer M.E. Sharpe, 1,376 pages, $225. The ideal anthology is now, one would think, impossible. Not aiming for the compleat condition as established by the encyclopedia (18th century), biographical dictionary…
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How a Biographer Repaid One of History’s Debts
In 1997, while scanning the books clamoring for attention in the literary editor’s closet at The Jerusalem Post, Haim Chertok, an occasional reviewer for that paper, noted a festshrift — a collection of commemorative essays — marking the centenary of the birth of an Anglican priest, James Parkes. Chertok had read two books that Parkes…
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Auschwitz Unlocked
Seeking the “lingering presence” that exists in empty spaces that once contained human life, 37-year-old photographer Simon Watson recently traveled to Auschwitz, where, after months of correspondence with museum officials, he received authorization to photograph areas that had never been seen by the public. Watson — a New York-based fine arts and Getty Images photographer…
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July 6, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward Louis Bernstein, a doctor formerly in the employ of New York’s Beth Israel Hospital, arrived at the editorial offices of the Forward this week, clutching an open letter to the directors of the hospital. In the letter, Bernstein charged that the hospital’s patients were mistreated in such a manner…
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